As the state takes its first tentative steps to allow growing of hemp, a Hudson Valley entrepreneur is betting that the plant — the non-psychoactive cousin of marijuana — will become a cash crop for an ecologically friendly building material.

Jim Savage is a former Wall Street analyst who lives in a 150-year-old farmhouse in Stuyvesant, Columbia County, that he has insulated in part using so-called “hempcrete” — a slurry-like blend of water, lime and the ground-up, balsa-like interior of the hemp plant.